Mark Newton - The Broken Isles

‘I’m excited,’ Gorri burst out. The young lad with red hair smiled at her. ‘We’re going to make a fortune.’

‘It’s only money,’ Pilli said. ‘I just love the fact that we’re finally going to be acknowledged , you know?’

‘You wouldn’t care about the money, rich girl,’ Coren said, leaning back on his chair and gripping the rim of the table, ‘but for us dregs, this’ll sort us out for years .’

‘Hey, guys,’ Jeza interrupted, ‘we’ve not got any money or prestige yet. Don’t you want to see what the plan is before you start spending the money you don’t have?’

‘Go for it,’ Coren said.

‘OK,’ Jeza said. ‘If our plan works — and even if it doesn’t we can still sell these on — I suspect they’re going to want some beasts for use in warfare, something more akin to a weapon. For that I think we can mass-produce the Mourning Wasps. But for a start, how about selling the soldiers something that’s not too distant from what they already have, something we can maybe clone and produce quite a few of?’

‘Mass-produced specimens?’ Diggsy suggested. ‘Some kind of monster?’

‘Not even monsters in this case. I’m thinking we give them a soldier that’s bigger, stronger — purely weaponry enhancements at first. Something that doesn’t even require anything but themselves.’

‘Hmm,’ Coren stared. ‘Sure, sounds OK, but it’s a little dull.’

‘It’s an investment,’ she replied. ‘It’s something they’ll feel comfortable with at first. They might not feel good fighting alongside something as weird as we can create, so it’s best to break them in easily to what we can provide.’

‘We don’t exactly churn things out at 54,’ Diggsy pointed out. ‘It could take weeks just to get a few enhancements. How long have we got?’

‘Working on Lim’s time theory, I think that we can produce what I’ve got in mind pretty quickly.’

‘Time theory. .’ Coren repeated, nodding his head. ‘Like it.’

‘So with that in mind. .’ She placed her large sketchbook in the centre of the table and began to describe what she’d drawn. ‘Look, I like the idea of Knights — they’re pretty noble things throughout history. They’re also warriors that will kick the shit out of things. This is how a knight used to look, but with biological armour. From that specimen of the Okun we took, just after the invasion, we can replicate its shell structure to form armour, as you can see here. Other than that, it’s pretty much a standard soldier, but much more resilient.’

‘How can you ensure this will be able to fight normally?’ Pilli asked. ‘This will, presumably, need to have some finesse on the battlefield?’

‘You’re missing the point here. We’re not making anything sentient at first. If we make just the armour, we can just sell that straight to the military. Using time theory in the replication process, we really can churn these out. They’re big enough to fit a human and, because it’s the shell material, as light as cloth. Afterwards we can start thinking about filling in the armour with something cloned and fleshy.’

There was a moment’s silence as everyone contemplated her drawings.

‘What’s it called?’ Coren asked.

‘I’m not sure. Black Knight Armour?’ Jeza suggested. ‘That’s something the army would fall for.’

Coren nodded again. ‘Is it easy to replicate and mould the shell?’

Jeza looked to Diggsy. ‘What do you think?’

Diggsy leaned back in his chair, lifting the front two legs up as he gripped the edge of the table. He seemed to contemplate the sketches a little longer before he said, ‘Yeah, we’ve done it before, haven’t we, Pilli?’

Jeza suddenly felt her heart beat a little quicker, but forced away her concerns. Not the time or the place . .

‘Absolutely,’ Pilli said. ‘Jeza, this is marvellous.’

Coren said, ‘Looks like it was the right choice putting you in charge of us lot.’

‘Seconded,’ Pilli said.

‘Thirded,’ Gorri said.

Coren stood up, grinning. ‘Doesn’t stop you from making post-meeting drinks though. Put the kettle on. Mine’s a tea.’

They had found the Okun during the fighting in Villiren, when they had been investigating reports of new relics recently discovered in the Scarhouse district. The five of them had wanted to get there before other cultists or the gangs got the relics for themselves, to put them on the black market.

It was Lim who had pointed out the corpse. The creature must have strayed away from its own lines and then died from severe wounds to its torso and neck, but the rest of the body remained intact. No longer interested in relics, Lim dragged it out of sight into a side street until he could fetch the others, whereupon they decided to keep it.

They brought it back to Factory 54. They wanted to study it and hopefully provide useful information to the military. Jeza had thought to herself that it seemed to appease their guilt for not being involved in the fighting. The boys seemed to feel it most — the guilt, the pressure that they should be doing something. Herself and Pilli had pledged that they would enlist if they did too, all together, the lot of them. But they did not sign up; they remained in the factory, listening to the sounds of war in the distance, occasionally retreating to the secure basement workshop in case the defensive lines were breached. Of course, they never were.

She had never known how Lim was killed. They simply found his body after a skirmish a few days after finding the Okun. He had bled to death from a cut to one of his major arteries. It could have been related to the war, or simply a casual murder, such was the way of things in Villiren at that time.

There had been daily reports of the ferocity of the attacks by the Okun — how they had cleared the island to the north of human and rumel life, how they had swarmed out of metallic vessels into Villiren harbour, how they had eradicated people effortlessly. That the commander had managed to prevent them taking the city was beyond any of their reasoning; but he had, and these things were — for the moment — not a threat.

She had to admit the Okun were frightening life forms, more sinister than anything they could ever create. Lim had commented at the time that nature was occasionally a sick beast herself, and could create weirder things than they could imagine themselves.

A blend between a hominid and a crustacean, the Okun were huge, bipedal creatures. Though alien-looking, they never seemed too alien — they possessed eyes, arms, legs — all in pairs, which seemed to suggest they were more a result of a perverted branch of evolution, rather than something monstrous from another realm. That was the military line, anyway, that they were flooding in from another world entirely, though everyone had their doubts about such claims.

With the Okun corpse back at the factory, the group immediately began a kind of post-mortem. Lim needed to know everything about its inner workings, about its structure, the way muscles functioned. He rolled up his sleeves, got all the tools organized, and together they got to work.

They bled its black, acidic fluids, which sat unused in containers. They tried for a while to cut through the shell, but in the end resorted to cutting through the joints and cutting flesh underneath the shell plates so that they could lift the segments whole. There were around three hundred different shell armour segments, the largest being a chest plate, the smallest being tiny forms of protection around their claws. Underneath, once the flesh had been cut away, they were amazed to see how similar it was to human or rumel anatomy, though augmented, transformed through alien means to be something genuinely awe-inspiring. There were two, slightly larger hearts, and four equivalents to the lungs. There were more tubes akin to veins and arteries, and strange, copper-coloured wires that led through the neck to the head.